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Revisiting the Stardom of Yang Naimei: The Typecast, the Modern Girl, and the Femme Fatale

  • April Wei

    April Wei is an Assistant Professor at BNU-HKBU United International College. Her areas of specialization encompass early Chinese cinema, women film pioneers, Hong Kong film studies, scriptwriting studies, and narrative studies.

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Published/Copyright: November 24, 2023
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Abstract

This paper aims to revisit Yang Naimei’s stardom by discussing her as China’s most famous femme fatale of the 1920s. She was the first Chinese film actress to be typecast according to her public persona, and the first to be cast in a series of anti-heroes. In my discussion, I treated her as an extreme case of the 1920s film actresses through which we could see more clearly their ambitions, their talents, their situations, and their struggles. I would like to argue that she is an extreme locus of modern femininity in 1920s China, where being a modern girl, a film star, or a femme fatale is one and the same thing. As a modern girl in search of her subjectivity, she exerted a vibrant energy in the search for visibility through performing stardom. This paper also examined the bense discourse that has been popular in China for almost a century, and in particular discussed why the film actress is always closely tied between her on-screen image and her off-screen image, as a response to an essentialist idea, attitude, and assumption that surrounds Yang Naimei, that she can effortlessly play a femme fatale on screen simply because she is a femme fatale herself.


Corresponding author: Dr. April Wei, Assistant Professor, BNU-HKBU United International College (UIC), Zhuhai, China, E-mail:

About the author

April Wei

April Wei is an Assistant Professor at BNU-HKBU United International College. Her areas of specialization encompass early Chinese cinema, women film pioneers, Hong Kong film studies, scriptwriting studies, and narrative studies.

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Received: 2023-06-22
Accepted: 2023-11-02
Published Online: 2023-11-24
Published in Print: 2023-12-15

© 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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